This article first appeared on the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.lebanon on Fri, 13 Sep 1996

LebEnv #10

TREES OF LEBANON: UMBRELLA (STONE) PINE

by Fareed Abou-Haidar

(This the first of an occasional series highlighting the flora of Lebanon.)

The Cedar of Lebanon may be the country's symbol, but it is rare
and grows in remote areas. I will not be talking about the Cedar of
Lebanon, as Rania Masri has already written an excellent article about
the tree and the threats it faces, available at the Al Mashriq web
site at http://www.hiof.no/almashriq/ as well as at
http://www.cybercom.net/%7Etonyk/Cedars/. Much more visible to most
Lebanese in their daily lives is a member of the Pine family
(Pinaceae, to which the Cedar also belongs), the Umbrella (or Stone)
Pine, Pinus pinea. Common in the mountains, it is one of the major
assets that attract people to spend the summers there. Its deep-green
color, wide canopy and ample shade, distinctive aroma, and the loud
cicadas ("zeez") it harbors have become the trademarks of a Lebanese
summer in the mountains.

This tree grows in most part of the country below about 1200
meters elevation, but forms the densest forests in the lower mountains
around Beirut and the Jezzine area, and seems to grow best in soils
derived of sandstone. This explains its profusion in areas like Beit
Meri, Broummana, Ras el-Matn, Dhour el-Shweir, Ain Zhalta, and Jisr
el-Qadi. It can reach a height of 20 meters. It "flowers" in the late
spring, and in the summer produces hard cones. In late summer, it is
possible to hear the cones cracking open in the midday sun. The edible
seeds (nuts) can be picked off the ground, or the cones can be
harvested before they drop their seeds and left in the sun until they
split open.

One of the tree's common names, Umbrella, aptly describe its
shape. This is the form it takes as it grows taller and its lower
branches die. In Lebanon, these dead branches are cut for firewood,
with little exception. This is fine, as the danger of destructive
fires is reduced. Unfortunately, the system that allows woodcutters to
keep all that they take from a landowner's trees sometimes encourages
the pruning of green branches too, resulting in a tall column with a
bit of green on top (although I have never seen a tree die because of
that; it eventually produce new branches).

The tree is so desirable that Fakhr ed-Din, in the early 1600s,
replanted a whole forest of them in the sand dunes south of Beirut;
the Crusaders had used it to supply wood for their war instruments in
1110. Moussa de Freij, a rich feudal lord, planted a forest of them
on a barren mountaintop overlooking his house in Shemlan near which
two giant trees, among the largest in Lebanon, also stood.

Unfortunately, succeeding generations have not treated the
Umbrella Pine as well. The trees, which attracted people to the
mountains for their summers, have been chopped down and replaced by
huge apartment buildings for people to spend those summers in. Summer
resorts like Beit Meri and Broummana now have fewer of the trees that
attracted people there in the first place. The forest of Rabyeh has
been shredded by roads and apartment buildings. Monte Verdi (Green
Mountain) is in danger of losing the forest that inspired its
name. The forest of Beirut for years was damaged by various human uses
(camps, cemeteries, boulevards, apartment buildings), and what
remained was incinerated by Israeli shelling in 1982. The mountaintop
above Shemlan was damaged by construction and by people cutting trees
just for the fun of it (first-hand eyewitness experience), and many
more were lost due to shelling during the mountain war of the
1980s. Forest fires have always been another predator of pine
trees. The steep mountain between Aley and Souk el-Gharb was a solid
forest until it was destroyed by a forest fire in the early 1970s.
Rock and sand quarries around the country inevitably take out pine
trees. (See LebEnv #8 for details on a land slide that took place
above a sand quarry and destroyed a forest in Jouret el-Ballout.) Even
hunting, as practiced in Lebanon, damages pine trees when gunshot is
fired into branches, breaking off twigs. In a few rare areas, I have
seen trees turn yellow and die, either from a natural change in the
properties of the soil and a lack of nutrients, or possibly, from some
kind of pollution. Burning roadside garbage dumps have also taken a
toll by suffocating nearby trees or by starting forest fires.

Still, there is some hope left. Part of the forest of Beirut has
been been replanted by the government and will become a first-class
park, with the help of French officials from the Bois de Boulogne. (It
is presently fenced off to give the young trees a chance to grow.)
Parts of the forest above Shemlan and the two huge trees at the ruins
of Moussa de Freij's house survived the war even as other species of
trees were cut for firewood. In the southern Bequa'a valley north of
Lake Qaroun, hundreds of pine trees (mixed with Cedars and Cypress)
planted as part of the Green Project before the war are now growing
into mature forests.

Still, the Lebanese need to do more to protect the tiny
percentage of the country that remains forested. There should be no
more land-subdivision projects in forests; land owners should exchange
their forests for barren government land or building rights
elsewhere. At the very least, they should build houses, spaced far
apart, that blend with the forest like their predecessors of the 1800s
did. Tree cutting for firewood and lumber is out; our forests are too
limited to support such industries. In the past, Umbrella pine trees
were cut and converted into disposable fruit crates; one of the most
wasteful uses of any product, similar to making throwaway cola cans
out of gold. Fortunately, cutting for non-construction purposes has
now been banned. Old sand quarries need to be re-contoured and planted
with trees to replace the ones they removed. Better still, areas that
now lack trees need to be forested.

A more radical thing to consider is the role of fire. In the
U.S., many kinds of pine trees have adapted to fire by developing
thick bark that acts like insulation; they even need fire for their
seeds to germinate. Because fires were fought for so many decades, a
lot of dead needles and branches have accumulated on the forest
floor. Instead of frequent low-lying fires (ignited by lightning) that
cleaned out the debris, there are now huge fires fed by the excessive
debris that burns and destroys the entire forest. I am not familiar
with the role of fire concerning Umbrella pine trees, but this is
something that needs to be explored. If this species has adapted to
fire, then we need to consider controlled fires during cool parts of
the year to burn off debris and return nutrients to the soil, before
the debris reaches dangerous amounts, as is being done in the U.S. to
reverse decades of mismanagement.

The Umbrella Pine, when properly cared for in its first few
years, can grow surprisingly fast in the right habitat, and new trees
will reach a decent size within the lifetime of today's middle-aged
people. There can never be too many pine trees in the mountains of
Lebanon.